Third Rail (19 page)

Thalia nudges him. “Talking to the Man?”

He opens his eyes. “Maybe.”

“Well, forget about it,” she whispers. “You have to have his private cell phone number.”

“That's how it works, is it?”

“That's how I figure it.” She glances around the church as if casing it for enemies.

Candace's sitting on one end of the first pew, Dex on the other, the rest of the family sitting behind them. No mourning dress for Candace. She's wearing a black leather jacket, jeans, and a flannel shirt. She's bent forward and sobbing. The minister strides in from the side, black robe fluttering, and Candace stands with everyone else. Sunlight filters through stained glass to fall on her pale, tear-streaked face.

Over on his end of the pew, Dex sits hunched and smiling, head pivoting as he scans the choir stalls and pulpit with his cold stare. He twirls a finger in his dirty yellow hair.

First blessing over, the minister asks the congregation to please be seated. In front of the family and the somber townspeople rests Robert Hammond's coffin, flame maple with burnished gold handles. Like the foundation of a burnt-out building, it looks smaller than seems possible.

Thalia nudges Harkness again. “Are they really going to let her stay up there all alone for the whole service?”

“Her mother and sister are dead,” he says. “Dex isn't exactly empathetic. Her father didn't have many relatives left, from what I can tell.” Harkness nods to the rows behind Candace. “And those people don't really know her. They're just here because it's what people do in Nagog—they show up when someone dies.”

Thalia's eyes glimmer. Not drinking makes her get teary. “She shouldn't be sitting alone at her father's funeral,” she says. “It's completely fucked up.” Thalia points. “Is Dex that asshole at the front?”

“Yeah, that's him.”

Thalia stands and pushes past Harkness, walking toward the stained-glass Jesus hovering beyond the Communion rail, his hands outstretched. She bends to cross herself, slides into the front pew, and puts her arm around Candace's leather-clad shoulders. They've never met but Candace huddles close to Thalia as if she were her lost sister.

Dex doesn't seem to notice Thalia, just keeps scanning the church like a security camera.

The organ music rises as the minister puts on his glasses and begins to speak. Harkness stands with the congregation. He hears fragments of the eulogy for the late Robert Hammond—
hard-working man, committed to his family, survivor of tragedy
—as he walks quietly down the aisle, gliding past the good citizens of Nagog and pushing through the heavy doors.

***

From the edge of the woods, Harkness takes a closer look at the smudged white house. It looks abandoned, windows sheathed in opaque plastic, lumber scattered on the front lawn. Three tilted gables jut from the roof, covered with rippling blue tarps. Misshapen boxes of additions trail behind the house until it connects to a small outbuilding. In the field behind the house, a small crew is building a stage, their hammer strikes echoing. At the far edge of the field behind the house, the barn's sloping roof is a patchwork of missing shingles and thriving moss.

Harkness reaches into the inside pocket of his leather jacket for the metal case. He opens the digital wiretap. Patrick didn't want to let it leave Narco-Intel, reminding Harkness that it costs about ten thousand dollars, which he already knows. And it requires a court order, a technicality that Harkness also knows about, but decided to skip.

He puts on the black headphones and points the device at Dex's house, tracing a path along the eaves, braided with cables, each ripe with data.

The screen starts to glow.

One by one, their screens pop up—e-mail accounts, blogs, and a couple of porn sites. Someone's watching a Hitchcock movie, the one with the swooping biplane. Even with Dex at a funeral, his house has more traffic than an Internet start-up. Music blares and people chatter.

His warning to Mouse didn't make a difference. No one is leaving.

Harkness watches for a few minutes as fast keystrokes send more data beaming out from the tilted house. There's no mention of drugs. Or the captain. They aren't stupid.

Dex's friends keep going back to a password-protected site that shows nothing but a few words.

 

Headless at Freedom Farm. Halloween night.

Come free your mind. A detailed agenda

will be provided free of charge.

 

For a moment, Harkness wonders what kind of party needs an agenda before he remembers the other name for Third Rail.

ADA will be provided free of charge.
Clever. And tempting.

A gleaming dot wanders around the screen like a bee. Harkness clicks on it and a registration form pops up—name, e-mail address, favorite number, mother's middle name, secret vice. In exchange, you get the password to a party and free drugs that might kill you.

Harkness closes the silver case and slips back into the thick woods.

 

A narrow, meandering path cut through the tall grass leads from the house to the red barn. A century ago, children wandered the path at daybreak to milk the cows. But what makes the barn so popular now?

Harkness walks out on the field, cautious to keep the barn between him and the house. The heavy sliding doors are locked, but a small side door opens with a shoulder slam. Inside the cavernous barn, there's a stack of lumber on one side, next to a radial saw circled by a narrow band of sawdust. Harkness walks closer, picks up a pinch of sawdust and smells it, finding it almost scentless, resin dried. Work on the house stopped months ago, when Dex and his friends found something more profitable to do with their time. Next to the back wall wait a couple of fifty-gallon barrels stuffed with trash.

From outside, the barn ends with a row of high windows, but inside it's windowless, the white drywall quilted with nail-gun dents. Even a quick look shows that the barn's shorter on the inside than the outside. He walks to the white wall and feels along it for some kind of door, but finds nothing. The sawdust is tracked with dozens of footprints. Harkness shoves one barrel of trash and it glides across the floor. The other is locked to the floor with an unlikely set of brass nautical latches. He unfastens them and pushes the barrel aside, lifting a heavy wooden hatch to reveal wooden stairs that lead down into darkness.

In the light from his cell phone, Harkness climbs down the stairs, walks a few feet, then climbs another set of stairs up into the cordoned-off end of the barn, where a bright room waits. Beneath blazing overhead lights, an intricate maze of glass tubes rises like coral from steel flasks and plastic drums. The droplets turn from clear to amber as they traverse the intricate apparatus. The room is filled with the low burbling of fermentation and distillation and the hiss of burners.

Harkness has seen dozens of meth labs in backyards and back bedrooms, each jiggered together with duct tape, soda bottles, and science hose. But Dex's lab—and he has to assume this is Dex's work—is immaculate and beautiful, a glass reef of pipettes as brilliantly crafted and delicate as a spider's web glowing in morning sunlight. The windows, painted black, shut out the world to create a private universe.

The lab inspires a reverential awe, as if salvation pours from the condensation tank into a half-full Erlenmeyer flask.

On one side of the lab there's a desk with a laptop, a row of colored notebooks, and schematic diagrams pinned to the wall. On the other side wait racks of hundreds of familiar amber vials, some filled and closed, others awaiting the precious syrup. And neatly marked boxes of chemicals, herbs, and other raw materials line the wall.

Harkness looks at the vials for a moment and reaches out to lift the rack and smash it. Instead, he plucks a couple of full vials from the rack and shoves them in his jacket pocket.

He climbs down the stairs and back up into the barn, where he drags the barrel of trash over the opening and locks it down.

His phone vibrates—a text from Thalia tells him Candace and Dex just left the church. Peering outside, he sees the stage builders walking across the field, hammers still in their hands, on the path toward the barn. In the final seconds before he has to slip out the side door and into the woods, Harkness rummages through the trash barrels, looking for insights no digital device could uncover.

Beneath a layer of newspaper waits a jumble of dozens of empty Chinese takeout containers, still crusted with black bean sauce and maggots of old rice.

Each bears the bright red
0
of the Zero Room.

***

Late into the night, Harkness sits at the kitchen table, staring at his laptop and sorting through hundreds of Jeet's photos. He's creating a
Greatest Hits
of boldface names from the permeable worlds of Boston crime and politics. Then one inexplicable photo stops him cold.

“Thalia.”

“What?” She's painting her toenails on the edge of the bathtub.

“Come here for a second.”

“They're wet.”

“Walk on your heels.”

When she's standing behind him, he zooms in on one section of a photo on a relatively quiet night in the back room of the Zero Room—a couple of strippers down to their thongs and bras; a serious-looking older man with a short gray beard; Mach and his slit-eyed henchmen; a famous chef with perfect hair and his Japanese girlfriend, ragdoll drunk.

“Who's this?” He points out a solitary figure sitting in a booth across from the gray-bearded man.

“Don't you know?”

“Of course I do. I just want to make sure I'm right. Ever see him at the Zero Room?”

“Nope, never did.” Thalia walks back to the corner of the loft. “But everyone goes to the Zero Room eventually. It's like a magnet for lost souls.”

“B
ILL THOUGHT OF YOU
as the son he never had, you know,” says Katherine Munro, an old-style Scottish
mum
with silver hair and pink-flecked skin. She's friendly on the outside, steely on the inside, like a butcher knife sheathed in a knit tea cozy.

“Yes, I do.” Harkness perches on a brittle side chair in the Munros' living room, now crowded with flowers and cards, pies and cakes.

“Thought the world of you. Loved his daughters, of course. But Bill was a man's man, as they tend to say.”

“Yes, he was.” During the first dark months after the BPD put Harkness on administrative leave, the captain invited him to the Munros' simple house for many quiet dinners. With their daughters in college, they were glad to have Harkness for company. Over boiled beef, roast potatoes, and good whiskey, they talked about Nagog—how the farmers were dying off and the developers swooping in, how they hoped that the town would never really change no matter how much new money arrived.

“You've been talking to Sergeant Dabilis, yes?”

“A nice enough man,” she says. “But a bumbler.”

“Can't argue with that, Mrs. Munro. He told me I'm not allowed to talk to you. Or even come here this evening.”

“Why not? You're a friend of the family. All of Bill's closest friends have come around. It's what you do when someone . . . when someone passes.”

“Sergeant Dabilis is running the investigation and I'm supposed to stay completely clear.”

Mrs. Munro puts down her teacup to clatter in its saucer. “He's already making a mess of it.”

“How?”

“Showed me some . . . papers . . . some old electronic mails supposedly sent to him from William. They were truly disturbing. And they didn't sound at all like Bill. After thirty years of marriage, I know what my husband sounds like.”

Harkness knows how simple it would be to backdate fake e-mails and make them look like they came from the captain. Even Sergeant Dabilis could do it. “What were they about?”

“About how he hated his life, and how he was desperately in need of more money.”

“Really?”

“Now, that last part might have a grain of truth in it, Edward. Look around here.” She waves at the simple room. “It's not like we're living in luxury. But we certainly get by.”

Harkness notes the slip. They got by. Now, everything is less certain.

“William was not a man who indulged in appetites and sin,” Mrs. Munro says. “Not liquor, fancy food, gambling, other women. Beyond his family, his work was what he loved and held dear. You know that. He was a leader.”

“Of course, one of the best,” Harkness says.

“Everyone carries something with them as they make their way through the world—something they want but can't have, or a disappointment over something that never came to pass,” she says. “But he bore his small burdens well.”

“Gracefully, even,” Harkness says.

“So I don't believe that he killed himself, not for a moment,” she says. “None of us do. He was a good Catholic and a devoted husband and father. Not the kind to just go out some night and throw himself off a bridge.”

“Not at all,” Harkness says.

“Only selfish men commit something as irresponsible and cruel as suicide,” Mrs. Munro says. “He wasn't a selfish man.”

An ancient telephone wire, painted into the ceiling molding, winds along the edge of the room. Harkness traces its progress and thinks about the conversations that once coursed through it—the captain calling to say good night to his young daughters, the captain taking important calls from headquarters. Not desperate calls, not late-night rants or early-morning lies.

“I'm sorry.” Mrs. Munro reaches over and puts her soft hand over his. “I meant nothing by that last remark, Edward. Your father wasn't selfish, I'm sure.”

“Actually, he was,” Harkness says. “That and a lot of other things, some good, some bad. Like everyone.”

“Yes, like everyone.” Mrs. Munro's eyes shine with loss and anger. “The dead can't tell us what they were thinking. That's the terrible part of it, Edward. I have so many questions for Bill and I don't know who to ask.”